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Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

philzimmermann.com

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Re: Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

#21

Post by toastal »

breput wrote: post #18
aborsy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With attacks on encryption and privacy by governments and big companies, we need more tools such as PGP. The user should hold the keys, not a government or company. Technical aspects are generally secondary, and should improve, but we shouldn’t dismiss good approaches due to implementation details.

You're absolutely correct. But unless the tools are designed so the average user can easily manage their own keys, it's basically PGP again. I think U2F/WebAuthn dongles actually could solve this problem but there are all sorts of new problems now like "how do I use this with my iPhone and also with my PC" or "what happens when lose my (physical) keychain with my dongle".

Not necessarily an endorsement (although I do own one), OnlyKey lets you store and use PGP keys in this way as well as U2F, OTP, etc.

Re: Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

#22

Post by tptacek »

breput wrote: post #14

Matthew Green does a pretty good job picking apart PGP's issues, although he completely fails at suggesting alternatives and also completely ignores non-email use cases. https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/08/13/whats-ma...

There isn't "an" alternative to PGP, because the idea of a single tool like PGP that covers all the use cases PGP attempts to cover has been revealed to be bankrupt. PGP does a bad job at practically everything it's applied to, because different problem domains ask different things from their cryptography. Backup tools want deduplication. Secure messaging wants relentless forward secrecy. Package signing systems want short, simple signatures --- meanwhile, messaging systems want authenticated key exchanges without signatures. Sometimes you want non-repudiation, but often you want the opposite.

To put this in perspective, it's a little like someone invented a bad balanced binary tree before anybody else came up with a hash table or a radix tree or a heap, and then a weird subculture formed around that balanced binary tree based on the idea that you should only ever use that tree algorithm, even though someone subsequently came up with red-black trees that were superior in every way to the original.

Re: Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

#23

Post by warkdarrior »

toast0 wrote: post #19
dosman33 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sad thing is if the clipper chip was ubiquitous today that could have killed the ability for spammers to spoof numbers. Some days I can get a dozen robo calls, each with a different spoofed number. People that want non-backdoored crypto could still do so. I'm still blown away at how hard it is to get people to use any encryption, even people who work in infosec/etc. If nothing else, 2020 was a great year for the…

You don't need a clipper chip to trace nuisance calls. You need an authenticated network that records the origin of calls, and hopefully passes that through when calls are forwarded and makes it simple and worthwhile to report nuisance calls and aggregates those reports and takes meaningful action against the origins. Anyway, we're getting shaken/stir or whatever RealSoonNow(TM), so we'll probably have better CallerI…

Would you want the same capability on the Internet? If not, what makes Internet communication different from POTS communication?

Re: Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

#24

Post by tptacek »

breput wrote: post #18
aborsy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With attacks on encryption and privacy by governments and big companies, we need more tools such as PGP. The user should hold the keys, not a government or company. Technical aspects are generally secondary, and should improve, but we shouldn’t dismiss good approaches due to implementation details.

You're absolutely correct. But unless the tools are designed so the average user can easily manage their own keys, it's basically PGP again. I think U2F/WebAuthn dongles actually could solve this problem but there are all sorts of new problems now like "how do I use this with my iPhone and also with my PC" or "what happens when lose my (physical) keychain with my dongle".

This is an especially funny thing to say when you compare the number of daily users Signal --- itself a niche cryptosystem --- has to PGP.

Re: Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

#25

Post by breput »

tptacek wrote: post #24
breput wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely correct. But unless the tools are designed so the average user can easily manage their own keys, it's basically PGP again. I think U2F/WebAuthn dongles actually could solve this problem but there are all sorts of new problems now like "how do I use this with my iPhone and also with my PC" or "what happens when lose my (physical) keychain with my dongle".

This is an especially funny thing to say when you compare the number of daily users Signal --- itself a niche cryptosystem --- has to PGP.

The Signal protocol is very well designed but the implementation requires a telephone number (I know it is coming). That's a step removed from PGP which can be completely offline.

Re: Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

#26

Post by lmm »

warkdarrior wrote: post #23
toast0 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need a clipper chip to trace nuisance calls. You need an authenticated network that records the origin of calls, and hopefully passes that through when calls are forwarded and makes it simple and worthwhile to report nuisance calls and aggregates those reports and takes meaningful action against the origins. Anyway, we're getting shaken/stir or whatever RealSoonNow(TM), so we'll probably have better CallerI…

Would you want the same capability on the Internet? If not, what makes Internet communication different from POTS communication?

Internet connections have a more-or-less reliable source IP (spoofing does occasionally happen and we take measures to mitigate it), IP ranges have owners and if an address is consistently used for abuse (attacks, spam email, ...) then people do report this to the owner of that address?

Re: Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

#27

Post by uncomputation »

There’s something… different about how people (techie people are most of my sample) would write before the 00’s. I’m not sure if it has to do with the medium, or the constraints of the time, but reading it always fills me with something I can best describe as peace/nostalgia. The belief that technology honestly can change the world for the better and that the most influential people driving it have good motives instead of profit motives. And they were real visionaries most of the time. By contrast, anything seemingly after the dot com boom (I can’t draw a clear line, this is just throwing a dart) seems, I don’t know how to describe it. Too self-aware, too clever? It’s similar to the contrast between HN and other forums/social media out there. I’m not sure, but whenever an older article or something shows up, I usually enjoy it. Perhaps it’s that only the best have survived till now.

Re: Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

#28

Post by forcry »

j0e1 wrote: post #10

> But while technology infrastructures can persist for generations, laws and policies can change overnight. Once a communications infrastructure optimized for surveillance becomes entrenched, a shift in political conditions may lead to abuse of this new-found power. Political conditions may shift with the election of a new government, or perhaps more abruptly from the bombing of a federal building. Prescient.

[flagged]

Re: Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

#29

Post by tptacek »

breput wrote: post #25
tptacek wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an especially funny thing to say when you compare the number of daily users Signal --- itself a niche cryptosystem --- has to PGP.

The Signal protocol is very well designed but the implementation requires a telephone number (I know it is coming). That's a step removed from PGP which can be completely offline.

That's interesting and all, but my point is just that you'll have to stop and think about how many orders of magnitude separate the userbase sizes.

A simpler way to make the same point would be that relative to modern cryptography, to a first approximation, nobody uses PGP.

Re: Why I Wrote PGP (1999)

#30

Post by pvg »

tptacek wrote: post #22
breput wrote: post #14

Matthew Green does a pretty good job picking apart PGP's issues, although he completely fails at suggesting alternatives and also completely ignores non-email use cases. https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/08/13/whats-ma...

There isn't "an" alternative to PGP, because the idea of a single tool like PGP that covers all the use cases PGP attempts to cover has been revealed to be bankrupt. PGP does a bad job at practically everything it's applied to, because different problem domains ask different things from their cryptography. Backup tools want deduplication. Secure messaging wants relentless forward secrecy. Package signing systems want…

it's a little like someone invented a bad balanced binary tree

It's a little like that culturally but it's almost entirely unlike that technically - a suboptimal data structure or algo tend to be just suboptimal-but-functional whereas bad cryptography and bad cryptography engineering often fail catastrophically. I know you know this, of course! But for one thing, someone used an iffy analogy on the internet, etc. For another, PGP people love misusing exactly this sort of analogy.

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